Tuesday, November 4, 2014

The Contemplative Cynic Contemplates Metaphors and Similes.

I wanted to post this article to ask if anyone had any other apt metaphors or similes for education (given that Peter Greene writes this about education):

"Teaching is like painting a huge Victorian mansion. And you don't actually have enough paint. And when you get to some sections of the house it turns out the wood is a little rotten or not ready for the paint. And about every hour some supervisor comes around and asks you to get down off the ladder and explain why you aren't making faster progress. And some days the weather is terrible. So it takes all your art and skill and experience to do a job where the house still ends up looking good."

Indeed. I'm not coming up with any better metaphors or similes myself, but I think he has, indeed, nailed "the hard part." The only thing I'd add is my students' lack of time (usually because they're working 2 or 3 jobs with unpredictable schedules to pay tuition and support themselves). I've done the "if I add this assignment/activity" math (what seems like) a thousand times myself, and, like him, have stamped down the guilt, faced reality, and streamlined, streamlined, streamlined until I have a syllabus/assignment sequence that I and my students can actually handle in a real semester, with all the minor illnesses, weather events, human and/or mechanical/tech failures, and other interruptions to the idealized semester one is prone to imagine in August or early January that inevitably crop up. I've also seen colleagues who couldn't make those compromises with reality (but/and who were damn good teachers, better in many ways than I) burn out. And I really do want (and, yes, need) to have a life beyond my work.

On reflection, rather than come up with a new metaphor, I think it might work to add to his: yes, we're painting the Victorian mansion, or at least one wing thereof, since other portions of the structure have been or are being demolished, and have been or are being replaced with additions of varying architectural period and style, in varying states of repair, which require varying techniques to maintain, update, or replace. Just as one gets an area of the building in decent shape, one is likely to see an administrator approaching with a wrecking ball (for no apparent reason other than a desire to "disrupt" or put hir stamp on the building before moving on to another one), or a group of students using it for a purpose other than the one for which it was designed, and which is dangerous enough to the integrity of the structure and/or the students' wellbeing that it requires immediate redesign and renovation or replacement. Meanwhile, other portions of the building which all of the "stakeholders" agree are useful and necessary and central to the university's mission are crumbling, because there "just isn't money in the budget" to perform basic maintenance, while shiny new towers in the latest style, impressive but basically uninhabitable (and liable to sudden collapse) keep appearing overnight in unexpected and often inconvenient places. Oh, and there are periodic tremors which suggest that the whole thing just might be built over a major fault line (or is it a not-quite-dormant volcano?).

How about Sisyphus? One does something difficult or demanding and, once finished, it's back to square one and start all over again.

That could describe each incoming class but I've known that applying to the same group of students. Whatever they learn in, say, a pre-requisite course is promptly forgotten once the final grade is issued. Much of one's own course time will be spent teaching that previous material as if they never saw it before.

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.